The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy Read online

  The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

  Translated by Cathy Porter

  Contents

  Foreword by Doris Lessing

  Introduction

  I Diaries 1862–1910

  1862

  1863

  1864

  1865

  1866

  1867

  1868

  1869

  1870

  1871

  1872

  1873

  1874

  1875

  1876

  1877

  1878

  1879

  1881

  1882

  1883

  1884

  1885

  1886

  1887

  1890

  1891

  1892

  1893

  1894

  1895

  1896

  1897

  1898

  1899

  1900

  1901

  1902

  1903

  1904

  1905

  1906

  1907

  1908

  1909

  1910

  II Daily Diary 1906–7 and 1909–19

  1906

  1907

  1909

  1910

  1911

  1912

  1913

  1914

  1915

  1916

  1917

  1918

  1919

  III Appendices

  L.N. Tolstoy’s Marriage

  Various Notes for Future Reference, and Remarks Made by L.N. Tolstoy on His Writing

  The Death of Vanechka

  Notes

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  by Doris Lessing

  It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions—as though I were the unhappiest of women! But who could be happier? Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours? When I am alone in my room I sometimes laugh for joy and cross myself and pray to God for many, many more years of happiness. I always write my diary when we quarrel…

  Sofia Tolstoy wrote the above in 1868, after six years of marriage. Many of her later diary entries also seem to have been written after quarrels.

  This collection of Sofia’s diary entries is witness not only to her thoughts, but also to public events and to Lev Tolstoy’s work—in the period covered by the collection, he wrote War and Peace, Anna Karenina and many other books. At the same time, we see the hard work of Sofia: she is an involved mother, though there are nursemaids and all kinds of help. She copies, and copies again, her husband’s work.

  …why am I not happy? Is it my fault? I know all the reasons for my spiritual suffering: firstly it grieves me that my children are not as happy as I would wish. And then I am actually very lonely. My husband is not my friend: he has been my passionate lover at times, especially as he grows older, but all my life I have felt lonely with him. He doesn’t go for walks with me, he prefers to ponder in solitude over his writing. He has never taken any interest in my children, for he finds this difficult and dull.

  Sofia longs for new landscapes, intellectual development, art, contact with people: “To each his fate. Mine was to be the auxiliary to my husband…”

  When the Tolstoys were first married, they read each other’s diaries, as a part of their plan to preserve perfect intimacy between them, but later they might easily create two diaries, one for the other to read, one to remain private.

  Sofia had thirteen children with Lev. Some of them died while still babies—one little boy in particular, Vanechka, who was adored by both parents. In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes painfully about the sufferings of parents who know how easily some small illness may snatch away their children.

  Like most women at the time, Sofia was at the mercy of her reproductive system—the advent of the pill was still almost a century away.

  There is an interesting episode in Anna Karenina relating to this predicament of nineteenth-century women. Anna is in exile from society due to her adultery, so she is staying in the country. She is visited by Dolly, her sister-in-law. Anna tells Dolly about the birth-control methods of the time. Dolly reacts to the information not with delight, as Anna had expected, but with revulsion—the idea of women refusing to bear children, their traditional role in life, is simply unacceptable to her. On her way back from Anna, Dolly hears a peasant woman giving thanks to God, who has rescued her by “taking” one of her children, leaving more food for the rest. Dolly is sorry for the peasant, but not shocked. This episode illustrates women’s views towards contraception at the time—Anna, the one person who accepts its use, is placed outside spheres of acceptable social behaviour, while Dolly, representing social norms, is shocked at the very idea; however, she is not shocked by the peasant woman’s more traditional means of birth control. In another episode in the novel, Dolly waits for a visit from her husband Stepan, which is likely to leave her pregnant, and even more worried about money than she already is. “What a scamp,” she muses about Stepan. In this, we see how accepted the burdens of childbirth were for women at the time.

  Another factor in the Tolstoys’ marital circumstances which proved difficult for Sofia—as it emerges from her diaries—was Lev’s relationship with Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov. Chertkov was Lev’s secretary. He became one of Lev’s closest friends and confidants, and the founder of “Tolstoyanism”—the school of thought of those who followed Tolstoy’s religious views. He was also a singularly unpleasant version of Lev himself. Lev became in thrall to Chertkov. Chertkov loathed Sofia, intriguing against her in every way he could.

  Tolstoy once said that he had been more in love with men than he had ever been with women. The Kreutzer Sonata, which poor Sofia had to copy, though she hated it, seems to me a classic description of male homosexuality. There was a great scandal over this novel, which describes the murder of a supposed lover by the husband.

  In defending this novel, which he did in another treatise, Tolstoy returned to his ways of describing real women as being like doves, pure and innocent. Had he ever met any real women? When it comes to the figure of Tolstoy himself, he is a sea of contradictions. He was an ideologue, he preached at people, he was always in the right, and yet he took his stand on a number of different and sometimes opposing platforms.

  He was also a bad husband, inconsiderate sexually, and in other ways. For instance, he insisted on his poor wife breastfeeding the infants, though her nipples cracked and it was painful for her. She wanted to use wet nurses. The truth was, the great Tolstoy was a bit of a monster.

  Sofia Tolstoy must have divided her later years into “before Chertkov” and “after Chertkov”. We have had plenty of opportunities to study the activities of ideologues, but Vladimir Chertkov was a newish phenomenon, and probably Sofia’s inability to cope with this man was partly because of the difficulty in categorizing him: was he religious?—oh yes, dedicated to the good, a fanatic in fact. But Chertkov wanted just one thing—to dominate Tolstoy, and in this he succeeded. And there was not only Chertkov, but all the fans who turned up from everywhere in the world, expecting to be housed, fed and advised by the Master. They turned servants out of their beds, slept in the corridors, were under everyone’s feet.

  Sofia was not well: it was said then, and is still said now, that she was demented. I am not surprised if she was. Tolstoy was threatening to leave her, leave the family, which meant to be with Chertkov. Sofia rushed out, distraught, into a pond. They saved her. “I want
to leave the dreadful agony of this life…I can see no hope, even if L.N. does at some point return…”

  In the end the whole world watched as Tolstoy fled his home for the little house near the railway where he died. Sofia was forbidden to go to her dying husband by Chertkov until the very last moment.

  Sofia Tolstoy lived for many long years as Tolstoy’s widow. She sometimes went to visit his grave, where she begged forgiveness from him for her failings.

  The diary entries in these pages bear witness to a remarkable life: the life of an exceptional woman, married to one of the most exceptional men of the time, with all her passions and difficulties laid bare. This is a book which is interesting for what it says about the predicament of women in the past, and how that compares to their present circumstances. While reading it, I was so enthralled that I found myself dreaming about Sofia, about speaking to her myself, desperately wanting to reach out to her and offer her words of comfort for her pain. Perhaps, hopefully, this record of her struggles will be a comfort and inspiration to present and future generations.

  Introduction

  by Cathy Porter

  Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy started keeping a diary at the age of sixteen. But it was two years later, in 1862, shortly before her marriage to the great writer, that she embarked in earnest on the diaries she would keep until just a month before her death in 1919, at the age of seventy-five. In this new edited version of their first complete English translation, she gives us a candid and detailed chronicle of the daily events of family life: conversations and card games, walks and picnics, musical evenings and readings aloud, birthdays and Christmases; the births, deaths, marriages, illnesses and love affairs of her thirteen children, her numerous grandchildren and her many relatives and friends; friendships and quarrels with some of Russia’s best-known writers, musicians and politicians; and the comings and goings of the countless Tolstoyan “disciples” who frequented the Tolstoys’ homes in Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow. She records the state of the writer’s stomach and the progress of his work, and she describes the fierce and painful arguments that would eventually divide the couple for ever. All this is in the foreground. In the distant and muted background are some of the most turbulent events of Russian history; the social and political upheavals that marked the transition from feudal to industrial Russia; three major international wars, three revolutions and the post-1917 Civil War.

  But it is as Countess Tolstoy’s own life story, the story of one woman’s private experience, that these diaries are so valuable and so very moving. Half a million words long, they are her best friend, her life’s work and the counterpart to her life and marriage.

  Indeed throughout the Tolstoys’ forty-eight-year marriage diaries were the very currency of their relationship, and they wrote them in order that the other should read them. In the early days she tried desperately to hide her troubled moods from him, recording them instead in her diary. When he expected her to merge with him and become his shadow, she stood out for her independence—in her diary. When he insisted on revealing to her all the ghosts of his past, demanding “truth” and confessions from her at every turn, she would keep silent and record her wretchedness in her diary, and communicate it to him in this way. And as time went on, and communication between them became more difficult, it was increasingly to her diary that she confided her worst fears, her deepest anxieties and her tormented desires for revenge—in the hope that he might see them there. The happy periods—and there were many of them—were rarely recorded.

  In 1847, at the age of nineteen, Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy became master of the 4,000-acre estate of Yasnaya Polyana and the 330 serfs living on it. He was a restless and changeable young man. An enthusiastic maker and breaker of good resolutions, he dreamt of social equality while enjoying to the full his aristocratic privileges (“serfdom is an evil, but a very pleasant one!”). Yearning for purity yet craving fame and women, he was constantly lured from his peaceful country existence with his beloved Aunt Tatyana to the brothels and gypsy cabarets of Moscow and Tula, where he would drink, gamble and sow his wild oats.

  At the age of twenty-three he decided it was time he brought some order to this aimless life and, kissing his aunt goodbye, he moved to Moscow. His purpose there, spelt out in his diary, was: 1) to gamble, 2) to find a position and 3) to marry. The first two resolutions he pursued enthusiastically enough. As for the third, although he did for a while entertain dreams of the woman he would marry, and fell rapidly in and out of love in search of a wife, his hunger for gypsy and peasant women soon got the better of him and after a few months he gave up Moscow as a bad job and left with the army for the Caucasus.

  There it was that he started to write. By the time he left to serve in the Crimean War, his Childhood, Boyhood and Youth had been published, and his reputation as a writer was assured. His experiences as a cavalry officer during the bloody siege of Sevastopol provided yet more inspiration, and by the time he returned to Moscow in 1856 his name as the author of the Sevastopol Tales had preceded him.

  But now it was the simple peasant life he wanted. On his return to Yasnaya Polyana he wore a peasant shirt, let his beard grow, abandoned writing for the plough and opened a school for peasant children based on Rousseauesque principles. He also fell deeply in love with a peasant woman named Axinya, who in the summer of 1858 gave birth to their son, Timofei. He longed increasingly now for a respectable wife to save him from sin. “I must get married this year or never!” he wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day, 1859. “A wife! A wife at any price! A family and children!” he wrote the following year. But he was still a bachelor when in the summer of 1862 he fled to Moscow.

  By then he was thirty-four. His books had made him famous, he had travelled widely in Russia and Europe and he was more than ready to settle down. He had no one particularly in mind, but he was determined to marry someone of his own aristocratic class, and to choose a young girl. Property-owner, womanizer, hunter and gambler, he was a rake ready to be reformed.

  Sofia Behrs was eighteen at the time, the daughter of his old childhood friend Lyubov Behrs, in whose crowded, hospitable apartment in the Kremlin Tolstoy was a regular visitor. Lyubov was the daughter of an illegal marriage, and though she was of an ancient aristocratic family her name had been changed at birth. At the age of sixteen she had married Andrei Evstafovich Behrs, a distinguished doctor eighteen years her senior, who was attached to the court. (Although as the grandson of a German military instructor who had settled in Russia in the eighteenth century, he was definitely not of the aristocracy, and the Russian aristocracy tended anyway to look down on the medical profession.)

  Between 1843 and 1861 Lyubov Behrs bore eight children, three of them girls: Liza, her eldest child, clever and rather distant, Sofia, a year younger, poetic and graceful, and Tanya, a lively laughing tomboy. The Behrs watched strictly over their daughters, but they had fairly progressive ideas on girls’ education, and they arranged for them to take lessons in foreign languages and literature, music, painting and dancing, so that by the time she was seventeen Sofia had received her teacher’s certificate. She and her sisters were also taught to keep accounts, make dresses and sew and cook, in preparation for marriage—for it was on this that all three girls’ thoughts were focused. And in 1862 all three of them were of marriageable age.

  Tolstoy, who had never had any proper family life of his own, was drawn again and again to the Behrses’ warm and unaffected family circle, and he would later use them as his model for the Rostovs in War and Peace. As for the girls, he found them all enchanting. But by the time he left Moscow that summer for his estate he knew that Sofia was the one he wanted. They were in many ways very similar: impetuous, changeable, wildly jealous, romantic, high-minded and passionate. And they both idealized family life. When Tolstoy met Sofia again later that summer, he had become the centre of her thoughts, and—though she was barely old enough to know what she wanted—the wedding was fixed for 23rd September.

  But not be
fore he had insisted (with her parents’ permission) on showing her his bachelor diaries (and insisting that she keep one too). Sofia was a very childish eighteen-year-old who, although her family had had its share of scandals, had led an extremely sheltered life, and what she read shattered her. For his diaries were one long catalogue of lurid, guilt-racked confessions: of casual flirtations with society women, loveless copulations with peasants, his passionate affair with Axinya, who now lived on his estate with their son, professions of homosexual love, disgusted diatribes against women, himself and the world in general—not to mention a desperate round of gambling sessions and drunken orgies. Sofia had dreamt of the man she would love as “completely whole, new, pure”. She never forgave him for thus shattering her dreams and assaulting her innocence, and forty-seven years later she was still referring bitterly to Axinya.

  Youthful promiscuity and gambling were not in fact so uncommon amongst young Russian aristocrats, but even so Tolstoy and his family had a reputation for fast living. His brother Dmitry had bought a prostitute from a brothel and died in her arms at the age of twenty-nine. His brother Sergei lived with a gypsy woman by whom he had eleven children. And his sister Maria left her despotic husband and lived in sin with a Swedish count, by whom she had a daughter. Sofia’s family did not live this way—and Tolstoy would always apply a double standard when dealing with his wife and with the world at large (including his own family). She could never really forget his sordid, loveless past, and was deeply scarred by the episode, to which she would refer again and again in her diaries.